This is my first post in this forum. It's for testing as well as my introduction. So just ignore it if you are in hurry.

I am moving around in the Linux world for the past few years, searching for a stable, secure IT solution for my personal need. I tried all popular distros, learned about their philosophies etc.

Now, I think, I got my target. Although it's not that easy, specially for someone not from Computer Science world, I am confident, gradually, I will pick it up.
Freedom is not easy to get, freedom is not easy to maintain.

As of now my favourite distro projects are Gentoo, Debian, Fedoraproject. So you may find me occasionally saying something about those projects also. Don't worry, I like to listen more than posting comments.

I myself may not help you a lot, I will try to spend few minutes regularly in this forum to learn from seniors & experts as I was doing till today, also I will try to help complete newbie who are almost similar to my situation.

I think a sticky is needed to be maintained somewhere in this forum, for new user introduction, at least for testing. If it is somewhere maintained, then I apologize, I missed it. __________________community runs by helping each other_

I was in trouble, because gentoo's install isn't so easy, but community has supported me all long my journey.
I have walked through several distros, but I like the idea of knowing my system deeply, so, the logical choice is a compiled distro and here I am!_________________“Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light.”
― John Milton

Your words show you have the right attitude, imo: it's all about helping each other to get our Gentoo working how we want it. (Please check that link for the post about FEATURES=buildpkg, which is probably one of the most essential things I recommend to newbs: it means you can roll back your system should anything go wrong with a package. It's not often needed, but when it is, it saves you a lot of hassle, ime.)

You appear to have the right motives to make a go of it.
Its really hard to mess up Gentoo so badly, you must reinstall. So you don't reinstall because something broke.
To learn, you fix it when it breaks. You will learn more from that than you will from it just working._________________Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.

Welcome e99plant! (Hey, are you sure you've no CS background? You wrote your location in camelCase )

As has been said, you join a wonderful community -- not just here, but on IRC and even in the bugzilla (and I'll be honest, you will be spending some time there before long ) -- and it sounds like you come to it well-prepared and with a positive attitude.

For some, Gentoo can be a bit daunting, even disheartening at first, but with whatever Linux knowledge you bring with you, and the support of this community, you can conquer all. As NeddySeagoon said, in almost ten years I've never hosed a Gentoo system so badly that I had to reinstall from scratch; I have done this once, but that was mainly because I wanted to see if the procedure had changed much in the first six years!

A lot of that is down to a really tight and well-honed base system and methodology, in portage and the stack of in-house helper apps and dev tools that underpin it, most written in friendly languages by people who love fixing stuff and aren't too proud to take advice in doing so. I actually doubt any other distro has so many lines of code, written and maintained by such a large percentage of its own userbase, devoted just to making the distro itself work well and help users help themselves -- even to the point that the bar to entry even for introducing your own package from scratch is actually lower than elsewhere.

Best of all, any programme you care to name will likely be available to you: if not in portage tree, you'll usually find an ebuild in one of the overlays, or lurking in bugzilla as a work-in-progress. The only exceptions that come to mind are the odd unlovely proprietary app whose vendor only bothers releasing for Ubuntu, and we've even managed a fair few of those. Seriously, learn to love bugzilla (if you don't already), it's always rewarding and before long you'll know the warm glow of grepping your own name in the portage tree

These forums really are vital to what makes Gentoo tick. I've never once been snarked at, and often find my problems addressed not just by the helpful masses but by fully-fledged developers, who seem to spend so much time here that I sometimes wonder how they get any work done